Tuesday, 1 September 2015

Radical Politics of Anachronism, by Matthew Cooper

Last month, the Washington
Examiner upbraided two Democratic contenders for the Presidency, Bernie
Sanders and Martin O’Malley, for wanting to ‘turn back the clock’[i].

It would seem a rather strange assertion to make, Democrats tending to think of
themselves as ‘progressive’; the proposal for which they’d earned the charge of
being backward-looking was, in fact, the reinstatement of the 1933
Glass-Steagall Act aimed at reregulating the banking system and possibly
undoing the poisonous effects of those ‘too big to fail’.

Shortly afterward, Jeremy Corbyn
– the left-leaning, anti-war MP currently running for the Labour leadership –
has been accused of trying to ‘cling to the past’[ii]
by his own party-mates and competitors for the leadership.

Again, the
reactionary proposal which earned him such scorn was not anything which can
remotely be regarded as in any sense right-leaning: the anachronism of which he
stands accused is that of reaffirming public ownership of, among other things,
the Royal Mail, the railway system and Britain’s energy infrastructure[iii].

It would appear a strange charge
coming from conservatives that they would attempt to attack those to their left
– O’Malley, Sanders and Corbyn – as being reactionary in some way.

However, it
is interesting to note that these candidates (in an American context, at least)
are appealing, albeit rather haphazardly and from within institutions where
their views are marginal, to an idiosyncratically conservative set of
perspectives and policy priorities, in a language that may indeed seem
out-of-step with the times.

The fact is that they are appealing to at
least that much: the language at least, if not the substance, of a movement
belonging to a bygone age.

The 1890s saw, in the rural America
which is now thought of as the Republican heartland, one of the most sweeping
and most radical movements in our history was taking place: the agrarian revolt
which found expression in the People’s Party.

This agrarian revolt, reacting to
an inhumane crop-lien system which placed hundreds of thousands of farmers,
white and black, into permanent and degrading economic dependence on
‘furnishing merchants’ (that is to say, loan sharks), issued a resounding call
for: currency reform to broaden access to credit for the ‘industrial millions’;
a graduated income tax; the establishment of a public postal savings banking
system; and public ownership of – what else? – the railways, telecommunications
infrastructure and postal system[iv].

This agrarian movement, the
Farmers’ Alliance, was based on both the idea and the practice of collective
self-help: farmers involved in the revolt gradually found that they had to
organise marketing cooperatives to get decent prices on their crops and fair
terms on shipment and taxation, as well as consumer cooperatives to bargain
collectively for the capital they needed to grow them.

However, they soon found
that merchants and financiers were conspiring to undermine their cooperative
efforts, and that these efforts themselves were on shaky ground thanks to the
hard-money currency system favoured by large banks.

Under gold-standard induced
currency contraction throughout the 1870s and 1880s, farmers found their crops
decreasing in value and their mortgages getting harder to bear under rising
rates.

The educational trial-and-error experiences of the farmers involved in
these cooperatives convinced them that a wholesale overhaul of the nation’s
financial system in favour of the indebted masses, and a nationalisation scheme
to forestall speculation and abusive tolls on the new shipping infrastructure,
were necessary to relieve the farmers’ debt burden.

But even at the time they were
most active, they were derided and ignored as backwards, as economic
illiterates, as people who wanted to ‘turn back the clock’ rather than progress
boldly into the future.

‘Populists in their own time derived their most
incisive power’, Duke historian Lawrence Goodwyn writes, ‘from the simple fact
that they declined to participate in a central element of the emerging American
faith. In an age of progress and forward motion, they had come to suspect that
Horatio Alger was not real.’

Tragically, the Populists were thwarted by the
triangulations of their own elected officials. The gold standard was, for some while,
retained.

A system of popular credit which would distribute the ownership and
productive power of the nation’s agriculture and industry into as many private
hands as possible was never so much as considered.

Instead, the Federal Reserve
was created to shield from view the activities of the shakers and movers of the
Gilded Age, the consolidating financiers. And the future into which a
forward-looking, progressive, Republican-led nation boldly strode, beginning
with the election of 1896, was one of penury, humiliation and crushing debt for
millions of rural Southern farmers, spanning three full generations[v].

But still deeper among the
tragedies of the Populists, according to Goodwyn, is that their defeat presaged
a new society and a new set of cultural expectations which were entirely
structured according to the interests of the financial elites.

These corporate
and financial elites did not, of course, object to ‘progressive’ reforms, as
long as they were carefully stage-managed from within the political class they
controlled, and as long as they were approached in timid, incremental terms
which left these same elites unthreatened.

But it was progress that came at a
cost.

In Goodwyn’s words, by the twentieth century, ‘a consensus thus came to
be silently ratified: reform politics need not concern itself with structural
alteration of the economic customs of the society. This conclusion… had the
effect of removing from mainstream reform politics the idea of people in an
industrial society gaining significant degrees of autonomy in the structure of
their own lives.’

Even nowadays, as both the
Sanders campaign in America and the Corbyn campaign in Britain show,
challenging certain prevailing ‘economic customs’ of the neoliberal corporate
society is a remarkably easy way of being branded as out-of-step with the
times.

It is worthwhile to note, though, that the candidates who are using
populistic language and appealing to a populistic worldview in the United
States, are not doing so in the organised way that the Alliance and Populist
statesmen of 125 years ago did.

To be fair to him, Sanders (along
with sympathetic libertarians like Ron Paul[vi])
has raised the issue of auditing the Federal Reserve in the past[vii],
and indeed has followed up on it some with, for example, the aforementioned
proposal to break up the ‘too big to fail’ banks[viii].

And Corbyn is tapping into a common set of cultural complaints among
particularly the disaffected youth of Britain.

But proposals like theirs come
from the top down and require a specialised knowledge of policy, the likes of
which the original Farmers’ Alliance and the Populist movement inculcated in
all of its members through the experience of the cooperatives.

As Goodwyn
points out quite astutely, such proposals cannot become the basis for a
broad-based movement (and indeed, will often fall prey to other, divisive and
sectarian, forms of symbolic politics along the way) unless they are
accompanied by an equally broad-based collective experience of the logic of the
credit market.

The sophisticated critiques of
credit which they adapted from the Yankee greenbackers would in some important
ways presage the slightly-later critiques of British thinkers like Gilbert
Chesterton, Arthur Penty and especially Alfred Orage and Cecil Douglas – whose
ideas, like those of the Alliancemen, were also adapted into various
cooperative and social-credit movements in Britain and Canada[ix].

But the Alliancemen of Texas, Georgia, Kansas and Arkansas showed, perhaps, a
distinctively North American faith in the democratic idea, and they followed it
as far as it would lead.

In their own day, that faith was downtrodden by the
forces of progress – particularly as they coopted the democratic language and
used it to justify a culture which severed the lives and livelihoods of the
plain folk from the knowledge of the systems that governed them.

But if Sanders
and Corbyn are indeed facing backwards on a Populist-light platform, they would
do well to take heed while they have full view: the history of the original Populists
would seem to suggest that, for better or for worse, the question which governs
their success or failure will in all likelihood lie in the educative potential
of the grassroots.